


You might as well live

by AMarguerite



Category: The Charioteer - Mary Renault
Genre: 1950s, Holocaust, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-02
Updated: 2016-05-02
Packaged: 2018-06-05 21:06:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,871
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6723457
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AMarguerite/pseuds/AMarguerite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A consultation with Dr. Greenbaum on his late patient, Alan Turing, stirs up all sorts of unpleasant memories for Dr. Alec Deacon, noted Jungian psychoanalyst. </p><p>TW: in-depth discussion of suicide, in-depth discussion of what happened to Alan Turing, discussion of the holocaust, homophobia, homophobic persecution, mentions of blackmail</p>
            </blockquote>





	You might as well live

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Naraht](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Naraht/gifts).



> Please do note that some pretty awful things happened to Alan Turing, like chemical castration and suicide, and they are pretty extensively discussed. The bit about the last time Dr. Greenbaum saw Alan Turing was taken from an interview with his daughter. Many, MANY thanks to whoweargoldintheirhair for the beta work!

Thursday, 10 June 1954

 

“Dr. Deacon,” came the staticky crackle though the office speaker system, “a Dr. Greenbaum to see you. He is here to consult about a patient.”

Alec guiltily folded up Ralph’s latest letter and hid it under the article on the collective unconscious he had been theoretically editing. “Oh, yes. Thank you, Ms. Elliot. Send him in, will you?”

To Alec’s polite, “And how are you, Dr. Greenbaum?” He gave the disconnected answer, “Thank you for seeing me, on such short notice.”

Well, thought Alec, that was an answer, of sorts. He said, however, “Of course. I’m only sorry I couldn’t come down to Manchester, and saved you the trouble of traveling all the way to London.” Alec sat and reached for pad and paper. “I take it the situation is serious, if you didn’t want to discuss it over the phone.”

“I think,” said Greenbaum, carefully, worriedly,“that a patient of mine has killed himself.” At Alec’s look of delicate, well-bred inquiry, Greenbaum said, “It’s the stutterer I told you of. You were very helpful about the, ah, underlying causes.”

“Suicide is terribly and unfortunately common in these sorts of cases.” Aside from Laurie, and possibly Theo, nearly everyone in his set had attempted, or at least thought of it, once. It was a grim statistic. Alec did not like to dwell overmuch on it.

“Odd you should say ‘common’ when his end was almost... poetic,” said Greenbaum, devastation creeping into his voice. “At the very least, it shows the efficacy of Jungian psychoanalysis. I never quite managed to help him develop an integrated personality but he seems to have grasped the power of archetypes. Stomach full of apple and cyanide, according to the coroner’s reports.”

“Was he particularly interested in the Snow White fairy tale?”

“Yes, he liked to repeat a couplet from that American film -- dip the apple in the brew, let the sleeping death seep through.” Greenbaum’s voice was shaking slightly; the strain of balancing was growing too great.

“There... there isn’t any chance of an accident?” Alec hardly believed that there would be. Not given the evidence Greenbaum felt most vital to speak of first.

“I think it’s hardly an accident, for all the mother insists it was some sort of... chemical mishap. I am... I am firmly convinced that it was deliberate. He kept dream books, and I myself noted he became more and more unsettled as the treatment progressed.”

“The psychoanalysis?”

Greenbaum paused and then said, after a moment, “No. The chemical castration mandated by the court.”

The pieces clicked methodically into place, like the time Ralph had found all the bits of typewriter Alec had pulled apart in a fit of exam-induced anxiety, and neatly put them back together. “Ah.”

“Yes.” Greenbaum pulled at his tie, flattening it against his chest, a little assertion of order and control against an unkind and chaotic universe. “He was more friend than patient. He- he came with us on a trip to Blackpool. Wearing his old school cricket whites, actually. The girls kept giggling at him. But this wasn’t unusual, you know, he always dressed oddly. Those mathematical types do. There was a fortune teller’s tent on the promenade and he decided that he would like to go in and see the fortune teller.  And he went in there and he was gone for a little while and he came out and we looked at him, and he was ashen faced. Absolutely horrified expression on his face.  He wouldn’t divulge what had happened, what the woman had said to him.  He was desperately, desperately unhappy.  And he didn’t say anything more after that.” 

“Did you see him again, after the Blackpool trip?”

But that was the last time Dr. Greenbaum had seen Alan Turing.

Alec carefully walked Dr. Greenbaum back through the evidence. It was an unpleasant business. Alec supposed there was room for other interpretations, and, though he suggested them, he did not believe them.

“I think,” said Alec, slowly, as the hour drew to a close, “that you were right.”

Dr. Greenbaum leaned back, eyes squeezed shut. “I think,” he said, softly, “I knew I was before I called you. I ought to have-- I ought to have known. I ought to have stopped it. Somehow.”

Alec suddenly could not bear to think about it any longer. He nearly flung aside pad and paper and strode over to the box of cigarettes. He felt more upset than he thought was reasonable. “You couldn’t have prevented it, Franz. That’s something that every psychoanalyst has to learn, the same as any surgeon. Some patients you cannot save, despite your best efforts. Despite how much you _want_ to save them, there are factors--”

He broke off.

A brief dabble in neurosurgery had left him unsatisfied; Alec had acknowledged he was a Jungian psychoanalyst with as much relief as when he acknowledged he was queer. But there were side effects to his work he had not entirely understood when he had committed to his profession. There were some cases that ate through every effort of doctoral indifference, like rust through metal. His mind was blank with panic and unnamed fear until he realized the name that haunted him: Sandy.

“God,” said Alec, softly. He wished he kept whiskey in his office.

“Yes,” agreed Dr. Greenbaum. “But still I-- I alone, out of everyone, _knew_.”

“I’ve...” Alec closed his eyes. Stupid, childish thing, really. Close your eyes against the monsters and they go away. But they never did, not really. They only retreated, to a deeper, darker place in one’s mind, and later crawled out, snarling, in unexpected ways. “I’ve been in your situation before, as a matter of fact. I don’t know if there is anything to say, really, except that it’s--” Alec finally managed to light his cigarette, though he nearly dropped the lighter on the floor, instead of back into his pocket. “If it’s got to a point where a friend of yours lives in such hell they can’t go on, there isn’t much you can do. In... in both cases, it was... there would have had to been large-scale societal changes for there to have been any... any hope.” He lit another cigarette from the end of the first, feeling worn thin, like a second-hand shirt. “It’s human nature to go over it--” this as much to himself as to Dr. Greenbaum “--to ask yourself, what could I have done? Was there anything I could have done? And when you have direct responsibility to help a person get better and they don’t....”

Dr. Greenbaum said, in a quiet voice, “I will never get over this.”

“No,” said Alec. “One never does.”

 

***

 

Alec canceled on all his afternoon patients. He couldn’t focus on anyone else’s problems, not today, with the ghost of Sandy in the room.

He couldn’t bear to sit alone with it, either, though. He called Theo.

“Hallo Alec, good of you to rally round, but really, no need,” Theo said, in the tired way of someone repeating a line they hadn't wanted to say in the first place. “Saw Alan’s death in the papers, did you?”

“Yes,” lied Alec.

“I only really knew him at Bletchley, where he was the oddball who kept chaining his mug to the radiator, and knocking down people on his bicycle. I felt very resentful he was one of the few qu-- well, that he was one of the few men of our set there. I complained so much about him because he was odd not because of-- because of anything else. Then, after the war, we scarcely had reason to talk. He was working on computing machines.” This last said with polite disinterest. Theo sighed and then, having finished his little spiel, said, more naturally, “Good of you to call. I think you and Laurie are the only ones who were actually worried. All the rest wanted gossip.”

“Unfair to our set. And to Peter.”

“Peter didn't have to call, did he?” Theo asked, dryly. “And anyways, we're all self-interested creatures at heart, I don't put you or Laurie up on any pedestals. I knew Laurie called because if he didn't assure Ralph that all was well with me up at Cambridge, Ralph would be up here soon as he reached shore. You, I know, are half disappointed I haven't gone specially off the rails in a way reminiscent of Ophelia or something.”

“That's not exactly how Jungian analysis works, my dear.”

“Well I don't know,” said Theo, peevishly. “I wish everyone would bally well leave me alone to get on with non-Euclidian geometry, but every phone call is reminding me that it doesn't matter if I solve it or not-- one slip and it's off to chokey. And only untested synthetic hormones if I say no. Utter waste of a good mind, and only more waste in future.”

Alec was silent for so long in response, Theo said, abruptly, “Suppose I should submit to psychoanalysis after that.”

“I don't see why you would need to. That was all very close to the surface.”

“Rather.” Then Theo said, wearily, “Oh God, Alec. I was forgetting. You partly called me up because of Sandy, didn't you?”

“Yes.”

“Look -- I've a meeting with all the other tutors of King’s this afternoon, I can't get away. I doubt Peter could. They're horribly fussy at the air works. I never understood it. I could cancel tutorials for a week and only get teased for eccentricity in the dining hall. Peter turns up two minutes late for his shift and it's the end of the bloody world. I know Laurie's at the Museum- he called from his office. Shall I ring him for you?”

“No, no,” said Alec, forcing the words out through a throat that wanted to close in on itself. “It isn't a bad walk, Harley Street to Bloomsbury. Nice day.”

“Exercise’ll do you good,” said Theo uneasily. “Alright, Alec?”

“Will be,” Alec managed. “Ta, Theo.”

“Ta.”

Alec canceled all his appointments for Friday as well, and left his secretary in a flurry of rescheduling. At the last second, unsure of his own reserves of strength, he called the British Museum and was passed around, like a baton in a relay, to the library. The last person he spoke to, however, dropped the baton at the finish line.

“I am afraid that Mr. Odell has gone to lunch already, Dr. Deacon,” said a woman’s cool voice. Alec could well picture a young, narrow-faced woman in tweeds and a short haircut, who probably kept three cats and read Virginia Woolf for fun. “He's usually walking his dog at this hour. Shall I tell him you’ve rung him up?”

“No, I’ve a free hour-- can you remind me of the park Mr. Odell usually visits with the dog?”

The walk helped, though chain-smoking helped more. Alec was starting in on a new pack (he’d bought it as soon as he left his office), when he spotted a limping man with a red-and-white border collie.

Alec had never really been one for pets, but was suddenly and intensely grateful that Laurie had been, and would always be, a Dog Person. The dog could supply enough conversation until he felt well enough to speak of what really troubled him. Then, too, the border collie was a tangible reminder that some ties of affection could save. The dog had been a graduation present from Ralph to Laurie, back in ‘41.

Laurie, hearing the word ‘border,’ had immediately named the collie Ballad. There was something more of the child than the border about Ballad, Alec sometimes thought, for it had Laurie’s coloring, loyalty, and tenacity, and Ralph’s discipline, stare, and tendency to herd. (It also, when left alone too long, had an ungovernable tendency towards destruction. It was fortunate, for both dog and man, that Laurie had the sort of patience that was only increased by unspoken, but acknowledged mastery.)

“Alec,” said Laurie, spotting him, and smiling. “This is a nice surprise. Rather far from Harley Street for you, isn’t it?”

“I fancied the walk,” said Alec, and started in with praise of Ballad, who appeared to have been recently groomed.

Laurie gave Alec a swift, measuring look from behind the wire-rimmed spectacles he’d recently taken to wearing, but accepted the brush-off gracefully.

It was only since Ralph and Laurie had settled into London, and Ralph had gone back into the merchant service that Alec had begun to think of Laurie less as an extension of Ralph than a person in his own right. It had never been a conscious diminution. Alec had enough self-knowledge to realize his friendship with Ralph was a unshakeable constant and that any other friendship entered into, with Ralph as the main intersection of their overlapping social venn diagrams, would be defined by Ralph. Ralph had that sort of an effect on people and situations. Laurie -- quiet and bookish, disliking fuss and always looking uncomfortable and vaguely hapless when swept into drama -- simply hadn't as forceful a personality.

Greater familiarity caused Alec to pick up on Laurie’s own quiet tenacity. If Laurie was sure of a thing, it was difficult to shake him -- but, aside from one or two early romantic misunderstandings caused more by ignorance than bull-headedness -- it took him quite some time to arrive at those hard-earned certainties.

Ralph, on the other hand, stated his opinions as facts and damn you to hell if you ever pointed out his arguments came more from self-loathing than self-understanding.

Alec was suddenly very glad Ralph was somewhere off the coast of England, and wasn’t expected until Saturday.

“--glad to see Ralph again,” said Laurie, testing the waters. He had led them to a deserted part of the park, flat and grassy, with a good view of the footpath. They were quite alone.

Alec deflected again. “Who was it who said happiness was a new idea in Europe?”

“Wasn’t that Saint-Just?” asked Laurie, puzzled. “I hardly pegged you as a Jacobin.”

“I wonder that it should be such a radical idea.”

Ballad ran off the path and started pulling a stick out of a bush. Laurie said, “I’m not sure it was ever something that was really taught to us at school. How to play cricket, yes. How to be happy, no.”

“It says something about the public school system, doesn’t it? It is vital we should all know the rules of cricket, but not the rules of... of integrating one’s personality successfully enough to find even some measure of happiness.”

“Perhaps they thought we’d learn it at home or something.” Ballad had learnt not to drop sticks for Laurie, and instead pressed it droolingly into Laurie’s left hand. Laurie tossed the stick, idly. “I never did. It wasn’t one of the things my mother thought vital to teach me. Did yours?”

“That was probably why she sent me to a psychoanalyst at a young age.” Ballad now presented Alec with the stick. Alec gingerly took it and just as gingerly tossed it.

Ballad looked mildly insulted.

“Never was any good at games,” said Alec. Ballad had already returned with the stick. Laurie took it.

Presently, Alec said, “It’s harder, too, when one is so frequently legislated against. One is never happy to be despised by one’s society for things one cannot help.”

Laurie had never quite gotten the hang of subtlety, a trait that was endearing and exasperating in equal measure. He turned to Alec and said, frankly, “What’s happened?”

“It’s not anything to do with me -- not directly- - just a... patient of a friend of mine,” said Alec.

“Suicide?”

“You know I can’t say.”

Laurie said, “Ralph’s fine, you know. As happy as he knows how to be.”

Alec took another pathetic turn with the throwing stick. He hadn’t known worry for Ralph had been preying on him like some emotional tick, draining him of energy and attention. But memory of Sandy’s death always colored everything that Alec cared about.

“At this point, I know the signs,” said Laurie. “And he hasn’t-- even the last time, when there was some thought of our splitting for good, he wasn’t-- it wasn’t nearly as bad as when he was expelled from school, or in Bridstow. He had a good war.”

“And that’s made all the difference.”

“Yes. He read about the Sacred Band of Thebes too young, I imagine.”

“Didn’t you?”

“No, I read _The Phaedrus_ precisely when I needed it, and not before. Took me something like seven years to understand it, however.” Laurie took back the stick before Alec could, and threw it surprisingly far.

“It isn’t Ralph I particularly wished to talk about,” said Alec, presently. “Though you have relieved my mind somewhat.”  

“Ah,” said Laurie. He shaded his eyes, checking on Ballad’s progress.

The silence was fraught, but not uncomfortable. After Sandy’s death, Alec had talked to Ralph, and Ralph alone. Whenever Alec showed up during the shore leave Ralph managed to wrangle in ‘45, Laurie would make polite small talk for two minutes, decide that he was superfluous to the conversation, and make an unconvincing production about being out of cigarettes and needing to immediately go and get more.

Unexpectedly, Laurie said, “I’m not sure I ever told you at the time, but Andrew Raynes -- that was the Quaker c.o. who punched Bunny--” earning him a measure of immortality in certain circles “--after Bunny said all he did, and Andrew forgot himself enough to punch him -- Andrew volunteered with an ambulance unit in London. He spent the worst part of the Blitz here, digging people out.”

“I think you mentioned it,” said Alec. “But it....”

“I only mean that I can enter into your feelings since I went through the same sort of... sort of thing,” he concluded, a little lamely, as a group of school children passed them by. “Perhaps something one did causes another person to rush into the worst sorts of danger, but once there, they make a choice to stay. One cannot take on total responsibility for another person. It’s insulting to both parties, and unworkable to boot.”

“But,” said Alec, knowing it was irrational, even as he said it, “if we hadn’t-- if _I_ hadn’t kept pretending I was capable of monogamy, and then proved I wasn't-- particularly before Sandy was set to ship out to Germany with the Royal Medical Corps-- he was in such a state when he saw the camps. If we hadn't-- if I hadn't-- he wouldn't have volunteered to go into the camps and treat the prisoners there if he hadn't been too unhappy to be cautious. And if he hadn't spent so long in the camps, he wouldn't have--”

“How can you know?” asked Laurie, sensibly. Ballad trotted proudly around their legs, head upraised, stick clenched firmly in his teeth. “Sandy had tried it twice before-- once the very first time I'd ever met him. If Sandy had stayed in London and seen an orphanage destroyed or something--”

“Ralph didn’t tell you,” said Alec, shocked.

“About...?”

“I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised,” said Alec, slowly. “I asked him not to tell anyone. But I thought it was sort of... accepted that I didn’t mean you. I thought he told you everything.”

“Not everything,” said Laurie, dryly. “Have you any notion of the hush-hush work he did in Bristow, and then afterwards in Portsmouth? I still don’t. Ballad, you silly ass, I can’t throw the stick unless you drop it. _Drop it_. Oh not-- stupid dog.” But the insult was said fondly.

“Let me,” said Alec, crouching down, in order to spare Laurie’s knee. He passed the stick back up.

“Thanks,” said Laurie, twirling the stick like a drum major, and then tossing it nearly out of sight. Alec was perhaps unfairly surprised that Laurie took the news of a shared secret between Ralph and Alec quite so well. Sandy would have been climbing the walls--

Oh God, Sandy.

“They... they rounded up our kind,” said Alec, with difficulty.

Laurie looked puzzled. “Yes, that was fairly obvious.”

“Not Jews,” Alec clarified. “ _Our kind_.”

“Oh, ah,” said Laurie. “I’d heard.”

He was patting his trouser pockets for some reason. “Here,” said Alec, offering the new packet of cigarettes. “Take one of mine.”

Alec had guessed correctly. Laurie drew one out and lit it.

“Most abused group in the camps,” said Alec, lightly, or at least, attempting to say it lightly. “Sandy’s last letter was... he’d been treating some of the prisoners who... who the other doctors did not care to treat. It was a risky thing for Sandy to have done. Sandy, of all people, who never wrote anyone notes, who rather prided himself on how impersonal his letters were. The stories they told him-- about how they were supposed to be _cured_ by various tortures-- it's bloody madness. But no one else seems to think so, or to have thought so.”

Laurie had his eyes fixed on him, the cigarette burning, forgotten.

“There’s nothing _to_ be cured,” said Alec, feeling an almost uncontrollable need to talk. “And yet-- God! At one point I was entirely convinced I would be a _successful_ Oscar Wilde, if ever I was found out. I’d go to some degree of trouble to protest that what I was doing was not blackmail worthy material. But now I wonder. I really wonder. And not just about that-- I wonder if we will _ever_ gain a degree of social acceptance. It seems like things are only getting worse.”

“Alec,” said Laurie worriedly. “Listen, my sister’s visiting, but I can have the spare bedroom tidied this afternoon.” In tones and phrasing very like Ralph’s, he added, “I don’t like the thought of you going back to your place, with no one there.”

Domesticity had never appealed to Alec, but he liked to warm himself on the glow of other people’s home fires, from time to time. Today was certainly one of those times. “Thank you, Laurie.”

“I could take off this afternoon,” said Laurie, relieved enough to start smoking again. “I was going to have a long lunch, any road-- I need to get Livia to the station and then to a physio appointment. Come on, let’s get back. I’ll need to phone my secretary.”

 

***

 

When Laurie got out of the call box, Alec said, suddenly, “Blast. I called up your secretary earlier.”

“Did you just say it was Dr. Deacon, for Mr. Odell?”

“I did, yes.” Alec handed the dog lead back to Laurie.

“That's alright then.” A little shame-facedly, Laurie admitted, “I, ah. I banged my bad knee on a book cart yesterday. One of the curators said he could hear my cursing all the way to his department. He hadn't heard that particular set of oaths since ‘45.”

“I'm really not that kind of doctor, but I can actually have a look at it.”

Even as late as ten years ago, Laurie would have refused, withdrawing behind an air of rather desperate self-sufficiency, but with the years had come a weary acceptance of his more painful limitations. “I've got the physio at half-past two, but thanks. I would appreciate being prepared before Miss Amanpur looks sorrowfully at me with her gazelle eyes and asks what I've been doing to the leg to bitch it up like this.”

“You ought to be walking with a cane, if you injured it again so recently.”

“Ought to,” agreed Laurie, in a tired voice. “I just hate admitting I need it. And it's hard managing a dog and a stick at the same time.”

“I can drive you to the station and your appointment if there's gas in Ralph's car.”

“There ought to be. He usually fills it up before he leaves and I don’t drive it.” There was no way of driving that didn’t strain Laurie’s knee in ways that made walking afterwards acutely painful, if not impossible.

“Shall I write you a prescription for something a little stronger than APC?” asked Alec, as Laurie went white with pain, going up the steps.

Laurie, with a tight smile, said, “Oh, it’s just one of my bad turns. It’ll pass. I’ve lived with them long enough to be used to them.” He unlocked the door. “Though I appreciate how free you are with your dope, Alec. It’s one of the first things that struck me about you.”

“There are worst first impressions,” said Alec.

They paused the narrow entranceway to unhook Ballad. Laurie looked through an open door on his left, revealing a cluttered but not untidy study crammed full of books. “Packed up, Livia?”

The only inhabitant of the study, a fourteen-year-old girl, gave a guilty start. She was ensconced in an armchair, a half-drunk cup of tea and a plate of biscuit crumbs in a side table, and _I, Claudius_ balanced on her trousered knees. “Um,” she said.

Alec was always initially startled by the sight of Laurie’s eyes staring out from Laurie’s hair from a less square and decidedly more feminine face. Olivia Straike was some twenty-four years her brother’s junior and occasionally, when they were out in London, Laurie was complimented on his daughter’s nice manners. Ralph found it terrifically amusing. Laurie less so.

“Thought as much,” said Laurie, wincing as he sat on the hall stairs to wipe off Ballad’s paws. “Fortunately I ran into Alec in the park, and he can drive us to the station. You remember Alec, don't you?”

Olivia hastily shut her book and scrambled to her feet, brushing biscuit crumbs off her blouse. “Oh, er, yes. Hello. The, er-- you’re a neurosurgeon or something, Dr. Deacon?”

“Jungian psychoanalyst.”

“Something to do with brains, any road,” said Olivia, with the mixture of shyness and brashness which particularly characterized fourteen-year-old girls. She turned beseechingly to Laurie. “Oh, _must_ I go back today? Can't I stay the weekend?”

Laurie levered himself back up, dropping the tag on a table. “I hate turning you back over to Mr. Straike, but mother will exile us both from her love if I don't. We don't want a repeat of the Christmas pudding incident.”

Olivia offered a shy smile in response. “I suppose not-- but if I said I was swotting away at your library, they couldn't very much object, could they?”

Alec, realizing he was superfluous to the conversation, sat down and took out a cigarette. It was somewhat amusing to see siblings interact like this. He'd never had any.

“Couldn't they?” Laurie asked, exchanging dog lead for walking stick, a Victorian antique of chased silver and ebony he had inherited from some uncle or other. Released from his restraints, the border collie rushed eagerly over to Olivia, and tried to hoover off any biscuit crumbs she had missed. “They won't take it very kindly if you miss your father’s last sermon before going off to visit your school friends for a fortnight.”

“But that's Sunday,” she said, wheedling.

“Yes my dear, but Ralph's getting in tomorrow and we'd be rather pressed for space. I hardly like to ask him to kip on the sofa when he's just got back from halfway round the world.”

“I could kip on the sofa.”

But Laurie was already gathering up magazines, hairpins, and various bits of transportable make-up and stuffing them into a school satchel. “Yes, my dear, telling your father... what exactly?” With an amused glance at Alec: “My stepfather is under the impression that Ralph began his romantic conquests suspiciously early, and joined the merchant marine out of school specifically to have someone in every port.”

This seemed a disconcertingly bald thing to say before a fourteen-year-old, but Olivia Straike merely giggled. “But Daddy can’t say anything because Captain Lanyon won that medal in the Battle of the Atlantic. And don’t make it out to your friend that we’re all like Daddy!  Mummy likes Captain Lanyon quite a lot! She thinks he’s a wicked romantic sailor and is always so pleased when Laurie brings him down for Christmas or Easter and things.  And I like Captain Lanyon. He always slips me cigarettes. I wonder why he isn’t married?”

“For much the same reason I’m not,” said Laurie, dry as a good sherry.

Alec hid his smile by cupping his hand over the end of his cigarette, as if he were lighting it in a strong wind.

Olivia rolled her eyes. “You let being injured in the war define _everything_. Just because you can’t dance wouldn’t mean you wouldn’t make someone a nice husband. Sometimes, Laurie, I don’t mind telling you, you’ve got the queerest views on what women can and can’t stand. There’s plenty at my school who hate dancing.”

“Have you quite seen what little knee I did keep after Dunkirk? I’ll show you when we’re not pressed for time, and you’ll be properly horrified.”

“You could marry a nurse or something,” said Olivia, stubbornly. “I’m sure they’ve seen worse than your knee.”

“Oh yes,” said Laurie, picking up the abandoned _I, Claudius_ and stuffing it into the bag _._ “Nurses will be lining the streets to get off a grueling shift of tending to the ill and injured to tend to a crippled, middle-aged librarian and an aging and neurotic border collie who will tear up entire sofas if left on his own too long. Livia, my dear, I’m afraid I’m one of Nature’s Bachelors. You are wasting your time with me.”

“Captain Lanyon’s hand isn’t even that bad,” said Olivia, switching tactics. “He could still find some more independent lady who’d like being left on her own most of the year.”

Laurie said, still dry, “Very sweet of you, Livia, but that ship has most decidedly sailed.”

Alec was hard-pressed not to laugh, and hid it by asking, “Laurie, where _are_ the keys to Ralph’s car?”

They rather haphazardly loaded the car, Olivia still stuffing things into her school satchel and suitcase as Alec drove. Laurie had to run after Olivia with her train ticket once they had unloaded their passenger and all the various bags and packages that traveled with her.

“However did you end up a librarian?” asked Alec, when Laurie had wincingly levered himself back into the car. “One always suspects a librarian of liking to keep things tidy.”

“Really? You can’t have met very many librarians. As a species, we seem to save what organizational prowess we possess for work, not for home. There is nothing messier than a librarian’s personal bookshelf.”

“How does Ralph live with you?” asked Alec, marveling at this news.

“By being at sea most of the year,” said Laurie, scanning the back seat for detritus. “And I usually get Mrs. O’Malley in to clean before he gets in. Still, it could be worse. Imagine what I’d be like if I’d never gone through basic training.”

Aside from an ability to neatly make a bed, and the lame leg, Laurie’s time in the army hadn’t much affected him. Then again, the war had more-or-less ended for Laurie at Dunkirk; he had retreated into his books at Oxford in early 1941, and, blessed with a First, an honorable discharge, and the aforementioned lame leg, he had spent the rest of the war and the years thereafter being claimed by one collection or another, eager for an Oxbridger who could not possibly be called up again for military service. Laurie had spent some pleasant years in the countryside with Ballad, writing to Ralph, and tending to and cataloguing this or that collection moved into a country house for the duration of the war. He had moved back to London when the collections did. Ballad, by this time, was a ten-year-old dog happy to sleep in the house or garden in Bloomsbury than to roam free. Ralph was less happy to be confined to Bloomsbury. If Ralph hadn’t gone back into the merchant service, and Alec hadn’t intervened again, Ralph and Laurie probably would have broken up, just as catastrophically as before.

Alec’s boyfriend at the time had said, rather nastily, “Really, my dear, I think you’re more invested in Ralph and Laurie’s relationship than you are in ours.”

Alec had been too drunk to bite back the unpleasant truth: “Of course I am. It isn’t mine, you see, so it can be understood.”

“What?”

“You can never dig up all that lurks in your subconscious without external assistance. It’s easier, in some ways, to see solutions to other people’s problems. It’s difficult to understand anything from the inside.”

Very soon thereafter, Alec found himself on the outside of that particular relationship. It had been fairly easy to figure out the problem then.

 

***

 

Laurie was highly suggestible, and almost confessional, when under the influence of several cocktails and the correct dosage of Fentanyl. Alec liked to lull Laurie into this state when the means were at hand, and then question him minutely about Ralph. It was not precisely _preux_ , as Wodehouse might have put it, but it was rather effective.

In this state, Laurie had once intimated that this relationship with Ralph worked only because Ralph was so often absent; a matter of scheduling that had made Alec’s relationship with Ralph equally successful, though for different reasons. When one laid aside the differing spots of tension (Alec’s marked disinclination for monogamy had little in common with Laurie’s Neo-Platonic hang-ups about sex), Ralph’s tendency to sweep romantic partners off their feet and immediately install them in both heart and apartment was one best mitigated by a wide stretch of sea. Ralph on shore leave was everything charming; Ralph grounded, and suffering from port rot and burgeoning alcoholism, was not. Ralph tenderly remembering details and offering advice through letters was thoughtful and touching; Ralph wordlessly arranging people’s lives for them in person was officious and maddening.

Laurie alluded vaguely to this, as he finished his third post-dinner cocktail. “But I really do think-- as long as I’m ‘home’ for him-- he wouldn’t. Ralph wouldn’t. You know.  Do you understand what I mean?”

“Why don’t you tell me what you mean?” Alec asked, automatically.

“Not that I’m... keeping the home fires burning, or keeping house or something.”

Alec eyed the untidy stacks of books and papers, the half-full ashtrays, the scattered papers about them, and the border collie sprawled on the hearthrug, legs akimbo. Everything was clean-- the floors meticulously so, after Laurie had once tripped over a stack of books and badly strained his knee-- but there was an air of scholarly detritus that spoke to its being the home of an upper middle-class confirmed bachelor who had never learnt to clean up after himself properly, and felt no need to impress.  “One could hardly accuse you of _that_ , Laurie.”

Laurie offered him a grin, like a child who had tried his best, but did not much care how those efforts had been received. “I meant it with quotation marks. I’m... as long as he knows he’s got a place somewhere he can return to, where he’s needed and useful, it won’t cross his mind. If it feels like coming home when he comes to see me, he won’t-- that was what always made him unhappy, you see. School was home. The sea was home. They got taken away for things he couldn’t help. I can’t be taken away.” He tapped his leg. “I’m very good at not going places.”

“Bit of a burden for you.”

“No more than the leg. And Ralph does have a knack of knowing precisely what to do when it acts up. Not just APC, what chores to take over. I used to find it harder to bear but it’s....” He attempted to sober up, and think a bit more seriously. He met with limited success. “Well, it was like learning to accept one of my legs was always going to be shorter than the other. One simply must keep going, however one can. I've never really quite understood how people could... could just stop.”

“Even coming back from Dunkirk?”

“That was different,” said Laurie, looking at his drink in slight bewilderment (Alec had given him a new one without his noticing). “I wasn't in a state where I was anything more than pain bound up in blood. I was well aware I wouldn't and didn't have a choice in whether or not I would die.” He took a sip of his drink and said, “You know, I could always tell you learnt to drink by trying to keep up with Ralph without having developed a taste for drink yet. They've got such a ferocious kick, and one never suspects it. We don't all have Ralph’s liver. I don't think Ralph has Ralph’s liver any longer.”

“Did you understand what Ralph was thinking, when he...?”

“Oh.” Laurie made a vinegar face, at the memory, or at the difficulty of speaking coherently while at the stage of inebriation where one will not remember the events of the past evening the next morning, rather than at the drink. “Yes, that. I wondered when it’d come up. I didn't... I didn't want to understand then. I knew why he was-- God, what a mess of a situation all round. He wrote notes, you know. Burnt them, but I read mine, before he burnt them. Did Sandy...?”

“No.” Alec looked at the melting ice in his untouched second drink. “He never wrote notes. I wish he had.”

“Do you _really_?”

Alec sighed. “No. I mostly just wish he wasn’t dead.”

Laurie nodded. “Wish the same about a lot of people.”

It was amusingly said; Alec smiled.

“But do _you_ understand?” asked Laurie.

“What particularly?”

“Why Sandy... why he _actually_ did it. Instead of just... threatening it.”

Alec said, after a moment. “I do and I don’t. I’ve known Ralph so long I knew at once after the two of you had quarreled that Ralph hadn’t anything left to really live for. He always needs an ideal, you know.”

“I know,” said Laurie, a little indignant. Then he slurred out something about ‘home’ being an ideal and sank back into his glass.

“He needs something or someone to need him. He had nothing. You were really his last hope of it. Ralph had been junking parts of himself forever. A total scrapping was always a distinct possibility. Sandy was... God. The worst part is that I never took it seriously. In his last letter I could tell Sandy was distraught over what he’d seen.” Alec closed his eyes and leaned back against the couch. His neck gave a faint twinge of protest. He’d been tense all day and it was wearing on him. “But I honestly thought-- he would only do it to get back at me. I no doubt deserved it, but I didn’t think--”

Laurie, with clumsy good intention, tried to open his cigarette case and spilled half of them on the ground. Ballad perked up his head, hopeful of a task.

Alec roused himself enough to pick the cigarettes up. He was glad the the excuse to look at the floor, to divert his attention at least partially away from the strangeness, the even more marked brevity of Sandy’s last letter. It was hardly a suicide note. And yet-- “But I think he always did it,” said Alec, “because he was hurting and wanted the world to see the damage it had caused him.”

With a pointed look at his ruined knee, Laurie said, “But you walk on.”

“Not everyone can, I’ve found,” said Alec. “We’re a relatively lucky type. Your mother’s guessed enough to invite Ralph for holidays and make him welcome. Mine still calls me every Saturday to ask probing questions about my love life and brags to the neighbors about her son, the doctor-- Ralph never had that. Sandy certainly didn’t. The Plymouth Brethren and the Scotch Presbyterians have such a damaging effect on later generations.” He handed back the cigarettes, keeping one for himself. “I suppose I blame myself still because the... well, three times he tried it before it _was_ my fault.”

“You can’t be blamed for Nazis.”

“They blame Jews for everything,” said Alec dryly. “I shouldn’t doubt we’ll get blamed even for the Nazis sooner or later. But it’s a horrible mess of guilt and shame. Even if I wasn’t the inciting incident, I was familiar with Sandy’s mental processes. When he was hurt, he made physical the wound someone dealt him. I, more than anyone else, knew his mental state. Shouldn’t I have guessed what would happen and tried to stop it? I did with Ralph.”

“Yes, but Ralph isn’t Sandy.” Laurie finally managed to light his cigarette. “And if you’ve ever heard Ralph on Queers These Days, which I’m sure you have, since it’s his favorite bloody subject aside from The Sea and The War, he’d hardly OD on morphia for what’s happening to other people. He’d fight like hell for them, if it got to that point, or just make logically inconsistent arguments in the sitting room, if not.”

Alec sat, defeated, on the floor. Ballad inched hopefully over, and then laid his head on Alec’s knee. “Yes, I know. I’m not particularly worried about Ralph’s self-destructive habits now. Well, not on a conscious level.”

“But I mean,” pursued Laurie, “that you... well, you knew Ralph and you knew Sandy but not in the same way. I mean, _yes_ , in the same way but it-- I don’t think you’re being fair on yourself. In one case, you saw a way to help and did so. I don’t think there was a way to help in the other. If what you said about the camps is true....” Laurie trailed off, frowning a little.

“Very much so, more’s the pity.”

“Then... I don’t know. What could you have done to fix his problem, except take on the whole of society? I tried to take on the whole of society at sixteen. It didn’t get past ranting at the other two boys who shared my study, and then having Ralph lecture me out of it.”

“I never even managed to do what I thought was proper at twenty-four,” said Alec, scratching Ballad behind the ears. “Amongst Jungian psychoanalysts, it’s relatively well-known I am the person to consult on homosexual cases, but I hardly bring my boyfriends to work events or to my mother’s. I don’t know what I’d do if someone came up to me on the street and asked if I was queer. I probably wouldn’t even answer his question, let alone take a stand about it.”

“Would that do any good?” asked Laurie.

Alec sighed. “I don’t know. It doesn’t seem like it would now.”

 

***

 

He slept badly, though it got a bit better when Ballad nosed open the door to the guest room and hopped up onto the bed. Whenever Alec began to lose track of dream and reality, he felt for the dog and would think, still fuddled from sleep, ‘oh yes, I never had a dog, and they wouldn’t allow them in the camps,’ and fall back asleep.

The morning brought with it a slightly restored sense of calm. At the very least, Alec could lay aside his worries about Ralph. Laurie had few illusions about Ralph, and a great deal of love; there were no worries in that quarter. Sandy’s unquiet ghost still lingered. It seemed to reproach him, ‘You always did care more for Ralph than for me. I know you did. And here’s proof: you saved him. You couldn’t save me.’

Laurie was still mildly fuddled the next morning, and signified his preference for not talking over breakfast by offering Alec a section of the paper along with toast and coffee. (Laurie drank only tea, but he thoughtfully kept some coffee around for Alec, who had become addicted to it during his final exams.) 

Alec was glad of this, as did not know what else to say, and so contented himself with the crossword, and watching Ballad on his rounds. Ballad kept to a very strict schedule. There were slippers and papers and walking sticks to fetch, and Laurie to herd downstairs and into the kitchen. Once Ballad had been briefly allowed out back to do his business and make sure yesterday’s smells had not changed overnight, he must gobble down his breakfast, and Laurie must be safely settled into the dining room with tea and toast. It was then imperative Ballad make a slow loop around the house. The dog went about it with enough gravity as to insinuate that the world would, quite possibly, end, and end in fire, if his rounds were not kept. Then there was the mailman to bark at, and several milk trucks and other lorries to watch out the sitting room window, and bark into order if they ever deviated from their routes.

“Don’t be alarmed,” came Laurie’s voice from the kitchen, when something roused Ballad’s particular ire. “One of the trucks probably has a flat or something. It offends his sense of efficiency.”

The dining room was at the back of the house, at the end of the main hallway, with the kitchen on the right, and French windows overlooking the little garden behind. If Alec leaned in his chair, he could vaguely see Ballad at the sitting room window.

“Mailman, I think,” said Alec, catching a glimpse of a person beyond.

“He’s late. No wonder Ballad’s in a tizzy.”

Much to Alec’s surprise, the door itself opened, rather than the mail slot, causing Ballad to race over and bark with renewed fervor, fading into a whine of high pitched joy. Ralph walked in, and dropped his bag on the floor. The better, it seemed, to catch the dog trying to jump into his arms and lick his face. It was at once too amusing and too delightful to see Ralph grinning, and allowing himself to be enthusiastically welcomed home, to call attention to himself. There were so few moments of uncomplicated joy, thought Alec. And so very few for Ralph. Let him have his moment of being licked to death and herded into the sitting room.

“Ballad!” came Laurie’s voice. Then, peering into the dining room, dishcloth in hands, looked down the empty hall. “What on earth--”

Ralph snuck up behind Laurie and, suddenly seizing him around the waist, said, “Scuze me, gov’nor, but I’m ‘ere on shore leave--”

Laurie, beaming, managed to smack Ralph’s sleeve with a dishcloth. “That was the most unconvincing Cockney accent I've ever heard.”

“Always sound toffee-nosed, do I?” Ralph asked, letting the bad Cockey fall, halfway through the question. He still kept tight hold of Laurie from behind, staring down at him as if nothing else existed in the world.

“Yes, I could cut glass with your accent,” agreed Laurie, forgetting about the rest of the world himself. “I wasn’t expecting you until this evening-- Mrs. O’Malley isn’t coming until eleven.”

“I don’t mind a bit of mess,” Ralph lied valiantly. “When I got ashore, I thought, ‘might as well see if there’s a place on the night train to London, instead of wasting a night on shore in some hotel in Portsmouth.’” He dropped his voice, to the low, persuasive tone he usually used when about to sweep someone off their feet. “Phone in sick today. I’ve missed you dreadfully, Spuddy.”

“Can't, my dear,” said Laurie, regretfully. “There's a grand do this evening. We all have to wear white tie and bow to the nobs.” His Cockney was even worse than Ralph’s.

“I’ll steal you away for lunch, then,” said Ralph, kissing Laurie’s temple. “ And d’you call a clout with a dishcloth a proper greeting? I’ve been--”

“I’ve to get to work, and Alec’s here,” said Laurie, not as if he were embarrassed by this display of affection, but as if he did not wish to flaunt his happiness before someone currently without hope of it.

One burnt-straw colored eyebrow shot up into the peak of Ralph’s cap-- he had only dropped his bag by the door, it seemed-- but he looked around saying, “Is he? Hello Alec, where are you?”

“Hallo Ralph,” said Alec, from the dining room.

“Ah, there you are.” Ralph could not quite resist kissing Laurie before striding into the dining room, the border collie adoringly at his heels. “I’m glad to see you looking--” He paused.

“Thanks,” said Alec, dryly. “Wonderful to see you, too.”

“You look like hell,” said Ralph, frankly. “What’s happened, Alec?”

Alec forced a smile. He didn’t know what to say, and Laurie had limped to the hall and was noisily searching for hat and cane. “Go unpack and have a bathe, Ralph. I’ll tell you after.”

“Always good with the brush-offs, weren’t you,” said Ralph, but it lacked bite. Ralph was dead tired. “Just reassure me you aren’t being blackmailed and that your mother hasn’t died.”

“No, I--” He sorted through the complicated morass of his feelings. “I suppose you heard about Alan Turing?”

“Yes, I meant to ring up Theo.”

“Oh I did, he’s alright,” called Laurie, from the hall. “Hadn’t talked with Turing since ‘45.”

“Yes, Theo rather wished to be left alone with Euclid,” said Alec. “Well, to return to the point: I’m friends with Turing’s psychoanalyst.”

Ralph gave a low whistle.

“I’ll see you both at eleven, for lunch then,” said Laurie, noisily and somewhat clumsily discreet. “Ta Ralph, get some sleep.”

Ralph lied that he would and said to Alec, “I’ll at least have a bathe. Will you bring me up whatever coffee’s left in half-an-hour?”

Alec made a new pot, and was unsurprised, when he pushed open the door to the bathroom, to see Ralph dozing in the tub, head lolling against a folded towel. Alec kept an eye on him, and sat on the commode, reading one of Ralph’s _Jeeves and Wooster_ novels.

When Ralph started awake, Alec said, conversationally, “Do you think Bertie Wooster is one of us?”

“If not, I’d be damn well surprised,” said Ralph, muzzily.

“And I’m sure I’ve met a lesbian or two who actually _is_ Honoria Glossop.”

Ralph snorted. “One of them’s currently seeing Laurie’s cousin Babs. Utterly terrifying physiotherapist, laugh like a freight train over gravel. Laurie runs from her. Ballad likes her, though.”

“It is nice to find one’s reality reflected in literature. You know, it surprised me, when we first met, that you liked Wodehouse.”

“Really?”

“Seemed rather frivolous for a Plymouth Brethren.”

“I’m only a fourth of one.” Ralph searched in the water, cloudy from bath salts, for the plug. “Of course I like them. Clever language about long weekends in the countryside, where everyone’s unusually nice, or unusually stupid? It's Edwardian England as it never was. Nice bit of escapism.”

This rather cemented something Alec had only dimly suspected before: Ralph was stuck on Laurie not in spite of, but _because of_ his firmly middle class stolidity. It seemed Ralph had always longed for this, the London house with dog and garden, and the weekend place in the country, passed down from generation to generation since the 16th century. He might even like the unexpected embellishment of having a country vicar as an in-law.

“Hand me that towel, would you?”

Alec did so, noting with concern the new patterns of scars marring Ralph's fair skin. He hadn’t seen Ralph naked in years -- not since the start of the war -- and was almost alarmed to see the physical toll the Battle of the Atlantic had taken on him.

Ralph stifled a yawn as he briskly dried his fine, fair hair. “Coffee’s gone cold, I imagine. Never mind, I’ll drink it anyways -- oh God, where the hell did you dig up that tea cozy?”

“It’s hideous,” said Alec, fondly. “It drew the eye to the back of the cupboard.”

“Laurie’s sister knitted it,” said Ralph, “when she spent all her pocket money on the cinema and had to make everyone’s Christmas presents one year. I’ve got an equally hideous muffler somewhere. I make a point of wearing it out in the country, out of solidarity. Dressing gown? No, that's Laurie’s.”

Alec put the blue one back on its peg, slightly surprised, and handed Ralph one of green Chinese silk, with a faint circular pattern.

“Well,” said Ralph, knotting the sash of his dressing gown. “Let’s have it out.”

And so they did, as Ralph dressed, unpacked, and straightened out everything in the bedroom. Alec laid on a divan, occasionally caressing Ballad, more often chain-smoking and struggling to put into words how Turing’s death had brought up all sorts of fears, and somehow turned Sandy’s into a newly fresh wound.

“Christ,” said Ralph, sitting heavily on the edge of the bed, and looking unfairly trim and attractive in corduroys and an old flannel shirt, open at the throat, with the sleeves rolled. “Grief’s hell, isn’t it? You think you’re past it and then suddenly, snap, it’s like it only just happened.”

The ashtray balanced on Alec’s torso was now depressingly close to overflowing. Alec stubbed out his last cigarette butt and moved the tray to the top of a dresser. “Grief and guilt.”

“I’m familiar with that particular combination,” said Ralph, dryly. “Hell of a time for you, Alec. I know it isn’t a thing you can be reasoned out of, but it isn’t your fault. Sandy made his own choices.”

“I should know better than to expect sympathy from you when you’re at the edge of exhaustion,” said Alec, meaning it to be amusing, though it came out rather weary and cynical.

Predictably, Ralph doubled down. “Empathy, my dear. I wouldn’t have wanted Spud blaming himself like you are. The choice was ultimately mine.”

Trust Ralph to immediately drop a depth charge to win the battle, thought Alec. He spent some time rubbing Ballad’s ear between thumb and forefinger. “It’s different. You always did expect Sandy to have the same strength as you, or to have the same type of courage. Sandy was courageous, in his own way.”

A little impatiently, Ralph said, “Yes, Sandy grew out of his worst habits, and I daresay, in the ordinary course of things, he would have been a fine family doctor in Aberdeen or some other small, Scottish city with a scene and cinema. But it wasn’t the ordinary course of things. It was war. We’ve all seen things that have hurt us permanently.”

Alec recalled his fragmented dreams that evening, little flashes of the camps. He realized, quite suddenly, just what alternative perspective his unconscious was trying to provide to his maladaptive ego. For years and years he had been assuming, however unthinkingly and irrationally, that Sandy had killed himself over their break-up. True, there were complications to it, and it would not do to deny that seeing the camps and the way the prisoners had been treated had done a number on Sandy, but Alec had always assumed Sandy would not have taken that much morphia if he’d seen the camps and still could call Alec his boyfriend.  

“Did you ever see the camps?” Alec asked, wishing to test his new hypothesis.

“My dear, the Nazis were a megalomaniac bunch, but they were hardly building camps at sea.”

“In news reels, I mean,” said Alec, a little impatiently. He was beginning to remember why he and Ralph had not managed to stay romantically involved. “I was horrified just by that. I can’t imagine seeing it. I dreamt about them last night.”

Ralph looked patiently resigned to a conversational detour into dream analysis.

“In dreams, the unconscious presents to the ego alternative perspectives that compensate maladaptive or dysfunctional attitudes,” said Alec, warming to the idea. “The unconscious challenges the ego seriously to consider these alternative perspectives. If the ego is receptive rather than defensive, it can evaluate these alternative perspectives and decide whether to accept or reject them. And I think, perhaps....” He mused on it, waiting for some phrase to float up to the surface of his conscious mind. “The reason why I was so shaken, I think, was because I... I assumed we won the war.”

“I don’t know where you were on VE Day-- or with whom--”

“American GIs,” said Alec, unthinkingly. “Marvelously friendly bunch.”

“I’m surprised you didn’t have to deal with a very different VD,” said Ralph, dryly.

“But I think....” Alec mused over it. “I knew what caused Sandy to tip over and into the Royal Army Medical Corps supply of morphia. It was hearing, first-hand about the chemical castrations and done to the homosexual prisoners in the concentration camps. Not hearing, per say, but seeing it, having to try and help, when it couldn’t be reversed or treated. It... it existed in the past. I relegated it to the same barbaric corner as burning witches. Something that happened to people _like_ me, not _to_ me, or to anyone I knew. But it... God, Turing was very nearly of our set. I thought Theo had slept with him. But Turing underwent the same thing as those men in the camps. How is what our government did to Alan Turing any different to what the Nazis did to their queer population?”

“Turing presumably was allowed to stay in his own home, retain his own property, and continue on in his job.”

Alec could not tell if Ralph was tired or just being difficult. His logic about queer issues was always strangely warped. In some exasperation, Alec said, “I know you’ve a heart of oak, Ralph, but for God’s sake! Sandy killed himself because he saw how bloody bad it was for people like him-- people like _us_ \-- in the world, and even the country on the right side of history was going to do the exact same thing as the one on the losing side. And for years I just thought it was an excuse he’d used because it was more respectable than saying I’d hurt him again, and this time past bearing. But it isn’t. In some ways, Sandy saw a lot more clearly than I ever did.”

Ralph made an impatient noise. “Alec, you’ve always been stupidly idealistic.”

“Thank you pot, I’m kettle. Have you noticed we’re the same color?”

Ralph ignored this. “You’ve just stated all the reasons it wasn’t your fault. Surely reason can exorcise a ghost as well as religion once did.”

“But when I’m haunted not by Sandy, but the knowledge that he was _right_?”

There were vague noises of movement. Alec didn’t bother to look away from Ballad. Ralph always paced when faced with a fact he could not shift or change through act of will alone.

“Christ, Spud’s pill collection has grown.”

Turning slightly, Alec saw Ralph compulsively tidying the inside a bedside cabinet, taking out empty and half-empty bottles of APC, medinol, Fetanyol, and other -ols.

“Like a damn dispensary,” Ralph grumbled.

“I’m not surprised, he’s been having increasingly greater trouble with his knee,” said Alec, though he regretted saying it almost immediately. This was an unkind thing to mention. Ralph had never retreated into unfounded optimism about his disabilities or about Laurie’s, but it didn’t do rub his face in the worsening reality. Ralph had developed a set of adaptive behaviors that were relatively easily to deploy and seldom needed to be changed (Alec had even ceased to notice Ralph had only one and a half hands instead of two), but Laurie was constantly having to improvise new adjustments and improvements. What had worked last year seldom worked this year, and it seemed quite clear to Alec that Laurie would be almost constantly in pain from now until the end of his life.

“Well so?” asked Ralph, heavily. “The grapes are sour. What’s the use of dwelling on it?”

“What’s the use of just accepting it when it’s getting worse?” countered Alec.

“What, then, in your considered opinion can be done? Sometimes _living_ is triumph enough.”

This was going to soon lead to an argument over how Alec escaped the Royal Medical Corps for further training in neurosurgery, and if he’d actually seen combat, instead of piecing together people who had, he would value life as more than just a neurological process-- and as tempting as the familiarity of the argument would be, Alec was too tired to have the energy for it. And, after how kind Laurie had been yesterday, it seemed rather unfair to argue over his medical problems as a mask for something else.

Alec sighed. “I can hardly talk. Whenever I get a sample of some new opiate I pass it on to Laurie. But I’m not-- that isn’t what’s upsetting either of us right now. It’s the reality that Sandy, damn him, was quite right in his analysis of our little corner of society. It grows daily smaller and less safe, and the risks of being forced out of it are increasingly worse. I don’t know what can be done. I admit it. I especially admit it now. But it wasn’t like this during the war. And when I think that it’s been nearly ten years and nothing’s changed -- that everything that ground down Sandy hasn’t improved but only gotten worse -- that again, I _knew_ how bad a situation was and did nothing. But what would I do? I was only telling Laurie last night that I’m about as open about my life as I think I can be. Other Jungian psychoanalysts consult with me on their homosexual cases.”

“It wouldn’t do any good at all if you were more open than that,” said Ralph, critically.

“And why not?” asked Alec, though he knew the answer already. “If normal people knew that we aren’t the deviants they think we are, and can be perfectly respectable--”

“And how are you intending to prove that when you lose most of your patients?”

“I might gain more, actually,” said Alec, with a huff of a laugh. “And thank God my mother knows about me. But it’s... it would only be a workable solution for me, wouldn’t it?”

“I’m not entirely sure it would be, given what I’ve heard has happened to Bunny,” said Ralph. About the time Ralph had been given a captaincy and a ship in the Atlantic, Bunny, to everyone’s speechless astonishment, had been taken into MI5. Bunny had not been speechless about it. He had been coy about his recruitment in such a way as to leave no doubt as to what he was doing, or might be expected to do. At the time, Ralph had contented himself with a fit of dark humor about how this was of a piece with how the war had been generally run, and the oft repeated bon mot, “Considering how good Bunny is at impersonating other people, of course he’ll make a good spy.”

“What has happened to Bunny? He get arrested for trying to pick someone up in a men’s bathroom?”

It wasn’t unlikely. Sir John Gielgud had been arrested for it only last October.

“Some blackmailer went to Bunny’s superior, when Bunny couldn’t pay up,” said Ralph. “I heard from a friend-of-a-friend that Bunny was pretty well shaken down to see what letters and little notes would fall out of his pockets, and then strongly advised to consider early retirement to France. I’m not sure what happened to all his correspondants, but I know that Toto, at least, had to hire a solicitor, and got off on the lucky chance that he signed all his letters with a little drawing of a terrier instead of his proper name. Thank God I never bothered to write Bunny any letters, and I made sure I had every page of those blasted diaries before I burnt them.”

“God, I’d forgotten,” said Alec. “I hadn’t known Toto’s blackmail case had to do with _Bunny_ . I was rather busy, and Toto was inclined to drink rather than to talk, last I saw him... God, what a world, what a world!” He sighed and sank back onto the divan. He had a horribly clear image of Laurie on the phone, face draining visibly of color, as his mother and step-father banned his sister from ever visiting again, of Ralph being deprived of his ship, of Theo being refused a fellowship, and of Peter being fired from the airworks. “What good would protesting do? Little enough when compared with the bad. But it just about kills me, Ralph, to think that I can _see_ things getting worse and-- and just letting it!”

“Alec, be reasonable. What can you possibly do?”

“Nothing,” Alec snapped. He pinched the bridge of his nose. He wanted a cigarette, but there weren’t any. Ballad, sensing Alec’s distemper, made a faint whining sound and rested his head on Alec’s knee. “God, I never thought I’d start agreeing with Sandy’s perspective. This is an awful situation and there’s nothing to be done on the individual level to alleviate it.”

After a moment, Ralph said, slowly, “ _You_ aren’t thinking...?”

The pack of cigarettes was empty. Damn everything to hell. He didn’t necessarily believe in hell, not having been brought up to it, but everything was a hopeless muddle -- Sandy believed in hell, he believed in it with unreasoning terror, and yet he still found life in 1945 Germany with the Royal Army Medical Corps, or life after it, so much worse than the threat of eternal fire -- “I understand why Sandy did it now, better than I ever did before, and that fucking terrifies me.”

“As well it should.” Ralph abandoned the collection of pill bottles and said, with gentle arrogance, “Oh stop looking like that. I’ve been bloody to you, arguing with you when all you wanted was comfort. Come here.”

It was rare to get even a tacit apology from Ralph. Alec took it desperately, and sat on the edge of the bed and let himself be held.

 

***

 

Lunch at least distracted him from the dual haunting. Laurie and Ralph swapped stories with giddy enthusiasm. Laurie’s were short and clever, Ralph’s were long and animated. Though not neglectful of Alec’s presence, they soon fell into a familiar rhythm of exchange. They were entertaining enough to be distracting.

It was difficult to think clearly about what was troubling him when so much of it came from the deep places, beneath his thinking, where archetypes roamed and his true self wandered through ever shifting labyrinths, with only the thin-spun thread of his memories to guide him.

After lunch, Laurie offered to show them round the Museum, which at least sparked something useful: a clearer memory of the dream Alec had had the night before.

“Compensatory,” he muttered.

Laurie took a doubtful look at the frieze before them, which featured some not particularly well-endowed Greek hero, nude but for his cape. “If the sculptor _was_ compensating he wasn’t doing a very good job of it.”

Ralph laughed. “That’s Freud, my dear, not Jung. Keep up with your psychologists.”

“I’m afraid I’m not terribly familiar with Jung, aside from what Alec’s told me in passing,” said Laurie, politely.

“Oh, it’s something else I was thinking of, not the friezes. The adult half of man’s life is for the individual to cease separating himself from humanity, but trying to rejoin it.”

“Alec,” muttered Ralph, “if you think--”

“I’m not about to go marching down the streets like Quentin Crisp,” said Alec, sotto voce. “That wasn’t what I meant.”

“Who?” asked Laurie.

Ralph looked both fond and indulgent. Though Ralph would never be as unreasonable as to demand total avoidance of the queer scene in his partners, it charmed and comforted Ralph unutterably that Laurie hated going to parties, was on friendlier terms with Bloomsbury intelligentsia of almost incidental sexual identity than Belgravia queens, and when forced out of his usual old-car-stuck-in-one-gear routine of work, dog park, and concerts during the week, and country cottage on the weekend, did not bear the change happily. “Tell you later, Spud. Alec’s just thinking of making an exhibition of himself.”

“If one wishes for an exhibition, the British Museum’s the place to do it, I suppose,” said Laurie, in a sly pun that Alec chose to ignore.

Alec said, “Come off it Ralph. It was only an idea, and a rather desperate one at that. No, the main issue is, ‘how can one rejoin humanity, when humanity doesn’t want one? Or at least, want one as one currently exists?’”

Laurie raised his eyebrows. Ralph looked as if he had challenged the world to do its worst and was at any second ready for the world to take him up on it.

“Not the usual post-lunch conversation, I know,” said Alec, dryly. “I shall have to mull it over.”

“Well, I don’t know,” said Laurie, a little helplessly, “it depends on what you’re defining as ‘humanity.’ We always cut out different versions of ourselves for different people.”

“Careful Spud, you’re not proceeding to self-realization like that. On track to develop a neurosis.” Ralph turned to Alec. “The contribution one makes to society does not necessarily need to be tied up in the less socially acceptable parts of one’s personality.”

Ah, thought Alec. This is why Laurie keeps saying Ralph’s had a good war. He’s contented with his sacrifices and victories. He’s even with society.

“I think you need to be taken out of yourself,” said Ralph, to which Laurie looked politely skeptical. Alec was terribly afraid he was being invited to an ill-thought out and emotionally fraught threesome when Ralph added, “Too much time spelunking around the subconscious will only get you into Hamlet’s head space. Next thing we know you’ll hop into the Egyptian display, steal a skull, and start soliloquizing. Come on, let’s go catch one of those experimental foreign films you love. Spud, I’ll be seeing you--”

“--in all the old familiar places?” asked Laurie, too happy in Ralph’s return to be much thrown into existential quandaries. “Or rather, back home, close to midnight. Will you still be up?”

“Depend on it, Spuddy.” Ralph’s tone was caressing.

The movie they saw distracted Alec not at all, particularly as Ralph fell asleep within the first ten minutes. But it was reassuring to have Ralph’s head on his shoulder, to feel the fine, fair hair, happily unanointed with hair oil or brilliantine brushing against his cheek as he contemplated the unhappy quagmire in which he and all his closest friends now lived.

It was not a problem that could be solved in one day, he admitted to himself. It was perhaps not one that could be solved within one lifetime.

The only problem that could be solved was that of Sandy. And even then he had only succeeded in reframing a horrible situation, not ameliorating it.

Without consciously willing it so, Alec imagined Sandy on his other side, just as bored as Ralph, but pretending very hard not to be. It was with patent relief that this imaginary Sandy noticed his distraction and leaned over.

“What's the matter, Alec? Not enjoying the film?”

“No,” Alec said, in his head. “I'm not in the state for any story but my own. And mine’s fairly absorbing at present. I've reached a crisis and I don't know how to go on-- practically, I mean.”

The ghost of Sandy said, seriously, “Now really Alec, you're not twenty-four any longer. The degree of difficulty you imagined then really isn't the same any longer. Franz just told you what chemical castration does to a man. I did too. You lose all parts of yourself. Especially your mind. Don't do anything to risk that. It wouldn't do any good to anyone.”

“I'm not doing any good to anyone at present.”

“Says the man with a thriving practice,” the ghost said reprovingly. “You are doing a lot of good for those individuals.”

“If I was any good as a psychoanalyst,” Alec said, mentally turning towards the ghost, “why couldn't I save you?”

In his mind’s eye he could so clearly see Sandy looking like one of those white rabbits with pink eyes that might have lured Alice down to Wonderland. “For one thing, you were my boyfriend, not my analyst, even if I _did_ let you practice your techniques on me.”

“I wasn't much good as an analyst or a boyfriend, it seems.”

Alec’s memory of Sandy was more direct than Sandy had ever been in life and said, tartly, “You weren't over Ralph when you first got with me, and then as soon as I tried to prove I loved you just as much as he did, you went running off with anyone who promised not to tell me about it. That was an awful way to treat someone.”

Alec winced. “It was. I'm sorry. And I shouldn't have broken up with you when you were conscripted. That was another--”

“That I didn't mind,” said the ghost of Sandy. “You were at least honest then. You'll recall I _accepted_ it when you said you didn't think you could _cope_ with a long distance boyfriend. I knew you couldn’t. Bunny told me, after he’d first found Ralph’s diaries.”

Ralph made a soft noise in his sleep, as if in agreement.

Alec said, “I made you very unhappy, I think.”

“You did,” acknowledged Sandy, “and very happy, too. But really, Alec, haven’t you been working it out yourself all day? You couldn’t save me because there was no way to have done so. You were in London, and I was delirious from sleep deprivation, and trying very hard to treat a really alarming number of people suffering from the worst crimes against humanity committed this century. We had very few supplies, fewer nurses, and more and more reports of the camps coming in. And you remember what I wrote you. No one was helping the homosexual prisoners, once they worked out what those pink triangles meant. And when I heard what happened to them -- when I saw how truly at the bottom we all were -- when I realized but for an act of geography that would have been me -- good Lord Alec, no one _cared_. About them, or me. Didn’t Captain Ramsay tell you later on that I’d had a breakdown and the Colonel forced me right back into surgery the next day? While everyone was saying the most awful, unkind things about the patients I was treating. I couldn’t cope with it.”

After a moment, Alec asked, “Was it hell, Sandy?”

“Yes,” said the ghost of Sandy. “It was worse than anything I ever imagined as a child. You know that. It’s what you’ve been thinking all day.”

“It is,” Alec acknowledged.

“And, you know,” said the ghost of Sandy, pensively, “the other times, I didn’t really mean it. I was trying to show you how much you’d hurt me. This time, I did. Perhaps I did want the world to see how badly it had hurt me, but I knew there wasn’t a fix for it and that’s why I actually took enough morphia to kill myself. And that’s what you’re realizing. There isn’t an easy fix for this problem.”

“Then what is there?”

“Coping mechanisms,” said Sandy, with a shrug. “I never really developed any. You did. So did Theo. So does Laurie. He’s actually rather better at them than most, since he compartmentalizes so many things, and has to keep finding new ways to make up for his knee.”

“It seems like there ought to be more to do.”

“Well, there can be,” said the ghost of Sandy. “Though you were never a soldier, Alec, my dear. Perhaps you’d better support those who are. That’s what we were supposed to do. At least, those of us who were in the ‘41 and ‘42 class at the University of Bridstow.” Alec mulled this over. He’d almost thought he’d done with the ghost of Sandy when it said, “My dear, you have a lifetime ahead of you to figure it out.”

Alec thought he might be drifting from fervid imaginings to actual dreaming; the ghost of Sandy was holding a book. He at first expected it to be _Treasure Island,_ Sandy’s acknowledged favorite, but it seemed instead to be _The Well of Loneliness_ , for Sandy read, “God... give us the right to our existence!”

Sandy had always read well, putting on accents, and pausing in the right spots.

“I still miss you,” Alec said.

“I know, my dear,” said the ghost of Sandy, kindly. “I knew when I did it. I probably took some satisfaction in knowing I would be missed by someone, at least.”

“Seems a paltry last gift.”

“But it was more than some of the people in the camps.” The ghost of Sandy smiled, in the kindly, tentative way that had always irritated Alec in life. “ _You_ imagined me, my dear. I can’t give you any answers you haven’t found yourself.”

“Damn it.”

He hadn’t realized he’d spoken aloud; Ralph started awake, suddenly alert, as he might have been when in the RNVR. “Yes? What is it?”

“Nothing, my dear,” said Alec. “Just thinking aloud. Go back to sleep.”

Ralph looked suspiciously about the theatre, but it was deserted. Unsurprisingly, no one else had been interested in a black and white experimental foreign film on a very fine June afternoon.

“At least there’s still kindness on an individual level,” said Alec. Ralph made a vague noise of assent. He was already half asleep again.

 

***

 

Alec was less despairing that evening, though he could not say he felt a great deal better. The problems still remained and would. Sandy was still dead. Alan Turing was still dead. Any one of them might be blackmailed, or arrested, or jailed, or castrated, or killed.

“‘It’s such an impossible burden.”

“I don’t know it’s impossible,” said Ralph. “Not if you can lay it down for a bit. It’s why I never could quite give up the queer scene.”

It was unclear if Ralph or if Ballad was keeping a stricter watch on the door. Ballad, perhaps, had the advantage of having stationed himself just before it, whining faintly, but Ralph had the advantage of understanding abstract concepts like “time” and being able to read clocks. Alec was sure that as soon as midnight struck, he would make some excuse to go to the window, or to fuss with something in the hall.

“It’s a thing I’m uniquely suited to understand, and yet... God. I think any era, any country I could travel to, someone would want me dead for things I can’t help about myself.”

“Then spite them all and live.” Ralph, who had finished off Alec’s bottle of gin, and had steadily worked through the bottle of rum they had picked up on the way back from the cinema, was moved to recite Dorothy Parker:

 

_Razors pain you;_

_Rivers are damp;_

_Acids stain you;_

_And drugs cause cramp._

_Guns aren’t lawful;_

_Nooses give;_

_Gas smells awful;_

_You might as well live._

 

The clock struck midnight. As expected, Ralph stood and glanced out the window. Ballad pawed at the door.

“He recognizes Spud’s step,” said Ralph, as pleased as a man whose son had won a prize at school. “Here he is.”

Laurie limped in just then, looking bedraggled with a lock of hair falling over his forehead, and wire-rimmed spectacles slightly askew. He absently petted Ballad, letting top hat drop to the floor.

“Rough evening?” asked Alec, sympathetically.

Laurie pulled off his white scarf with a theatrical flourish, casting it aside from him, onto a chair, with a gesture similar to Pontius Pilate washing his hands for the condemnation of Jesus.

“That bad?” Ralph asked, restraining, with difficulty, from picking up the scarf and hanging it up. “Have a drink and come tell us about it.”

“APC would be better,” said Laurie. Alec noted, with a twinge of concern, how heavily Laurie was leaning on his cane to get the perhaps six feet from the door to his usual chair and ottoman. “I've had too much champagne for one of your specials. Shall I tell you the highlight of my evening, my dear? I was standing about -- well, leaning about on my cane, the knee’s pretty bad this evening -- trying to look pompous and officious so no one would try to talk to me while I was in a mood, and a very drunk peer came right up to me and whispered--” here affecting a drunken slur “--’Pardon me, Mr. Odell, but those marbles over there- they haven't got any heads.’” For Alec’s benefit, he added, “Our grand do was in the Museum itself. My lord was referring to the Elgin Marbles behind me.”

“Oh Lord,” said Ralph, handing Laurie a tumbler of water and a handful of tablets. Alec was hard put not to smile.

“It was something it of a bloody farce after that,” said Laurie grimly. “Turned around, saw the marbles, was flabbergasted -- which he took to be confirmation of his own point of view. ‘Thought I ought to mention it,’ said he, very solicitously. ‘No heads.’ I asked him if he knew those were the Elgin Marbles, he made a noise that sounded like he knew what I was talking about, but followed it up with, ‘So it's a good thing I mentioned it! They sound frightfully important.’ I told him the marbles had been headless for quite some time and he exclaimed, ‘Oh yes, the Blitz! Mother’s statuary suffered something awful and we were only in-’ well, never mind the county. I gave him to understand that the marbles had not been decapitated during the Blitz, but had come to the Museum that way when Elgin first purchased them. You would have thought I'd just said ‘Heil Hitler’ the way he went off. What a horrible outrage had been visited upon the British people, why on earth had we actually paid for headless statues, and was Lord Elgin really so stupid as to think that people in Ancient Greece had no heads when buying so-called complete statues. Obviously people in Ancient Greece had _heads_.”

Ralph said, in a choked voice, “Poor Spuddy.”

Laurie downed the tablets with a grimace. “Bloody nightmare of a conversation. I made noises about working in the library department, not conservation, but this didn’t much help. Where’s the -- why, thank you Ballad.”

With an air of helpful conscientiousness, Ballad had brought over Laurie’s slippers.

“I can’t manage them at the moment, but thank you,” Laurie sat, patting the dog on the head. Ballad was not to be fobbed off that easily. He made a faintly chiding noise, and pushed the slippers at Laurie again.

“He must always be doing,” said Ralph, perching on the edge of a table.  

The scene was absurdly domestic, and -- but for the sexes of everyone involved -- conventional. Strange that one factor could make such a scene so transgressive. How the world would recoil in horror from the existence of this. Alec laughed suddenly.

“Alright,” said Laurie, grudgingly, the corners of his mouth quirking up into a smile. “The whole exchange was a _little_ amusing.”

It wasn’t that, but it didn’t seem worthwhile to clarify. Sometimes the sheer audacity of one’s existence was fight enough.

 


End file.
